Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston

Chapters 13–14

Chapters 15–16, page 2

page 1 of 2

Summary: Chapter 15

After a while in the muck, Janie begins to grow jealous
of Nunkie, a chunky girl who flirts with Tea Cake in the fields.
As the season goes on, Nunkie grows bolder and bolder and is always
falling over Tea Cake and playfully touching him. One day, Janie
gets distracted and then finds that Nunkie and Tea Cake have disappeared.
Their friend Sop-de-Bottom tells Janie that Nunkie and Tea Cake
are over in a patch of cane. Janie rushes over and finds them play-wrestling
on the ground. Tea Cake explains that Nunkie stole his work tickets and
coquettishly made him tussle for them. Nunkie flees, and when the
couple returns home, Janie tries to beat Tea Cake. But he holds her
off, and her wild anger transforms into wild passion. In bed the next
morning, they both joke about what a foolish girl Nunkie is.

Summary: Chapter 16

The season ends, and Janie and Tea Cake decide to stay
around for another year. During the off-season, there isn’t much
to do, so Janie spends more time socializing. She hangs out a little
with the exotic Bahamians who live in the muck but spends most
of her time with Mrs. Turner. Although she is black,
Mrs. Turner, a funny-looking, conceited woman, talks all the time
about the evils of black people. She loves whiteness and argues
that black people are lazy and foolish and that they should try
to “lighten up de race.” She dislikes the dark-skinned Tea Cake
and wants Janie to marry her light-skinned brother.

Tea Cake overhears a conversation between Janie and Mrs. Turner
and tells Janie that he doesn’t want Mrs. Turner around the house.
He plans to visit Mr. Turner to tell him to keep his wife away, but
when he meets the man on the street, Tea Cake finds that he is a depressed,
passive man dominated by his wife and drained by the deaths of several
of his children. He gets Janie to try to end her friendship with
Mrs. Turner. Janie acts coldly toward Mrs. Turner, but the woman
keeps visiting nonetheless. Mrs. Turner worships whiteness, and
Janie, by virtue of her light skin and high-class demeanor, represents
an ideal for her. She disapproves of Janie’s marriage to Tea Cake,
but her opinions matter little to them. The summer soon ends, and
the busy season begins again.

Analysis: Chapters 15–16

The incident with Nunkie shows Janie’s need for absolute
monogamy with Tea Cake. Because he wholly possesses her, she cannot bear
the thought that she does not wholly possess him. Although the previous
chapters establish the inequalities in their relationship, this chapter
reveals that Janie is not willing to compromise on important matters;
their relationship must be reciprocal. It is interesting to see how
this reciprocity is expressed. At the first moment of reconciliation—the
steamy passion that follows their fight—they express themselves
through their bodies. Speech, however, remains the key to Janie’s
strength and identity; despite their physical connection, Janie
still needs Tea Cake to tell her that he doesn’t
love Nunkie.

Through Janie’s interactions with Mrs. Turner, Chapter 16 provides
the clearest perspective on issues of race in the novel. Many critics
dismissed Their Eyes Were Watching God when it
was first published because of its atypical discussion of race.
At the time, most critics, black and white alike, expected a novel
by a black author to deal with issues of race in stark, political
terms. Hurston’s presentation of race and racism, however, is nuanced
and remarkably free of political diatribe. When discussing Hurston’s
perspective on race, one cannot underestimate the effect of Franz
Boas and his anthropological outlook on her philosophy. Boas, considered one
of the most important anthropologists of the 20th
century, was Hurston’s professor at Barnard College from 1925 to 1927.
Instead of approaching race as a marker of innate difference and
inferiority, he began to use anthropology to study race in cultural
terms, discussing, for example, how ideas of racism circulate. Boas
believed that race is not the fundamental truth about a person or
group of people but rather a mere cultural construct that affects
the perception of a specific person or group. Boas’s perspective
was the source of Hurston’s iconoclastic depiction of racism: in
the novel, racism is a mode of thought, capable of seducing white
and black alike, and, as such, is a force larger than any particular
person or group.

Indeed, the narrator attributes near-cosmic significance
to Mrs. Turner’s racism. In her obsession with whiteness, she “like
all the other believers had built an altar to the unattainable,”
the narrator reveals, which seems to be a comparison to Jody’s materialism
and thirst for power. This comparison destabilizes the
gender conventions that Hurston posits at the opening of the novel:
Mrs. Turner, as men do, watches a metaphorical “Ships at a distance.” Hurston
does not dogmatically bind herself to her own conception of gender
differences. As Janie’s hair can be both a site of feminine beauty
and a phallic symbol, Mrs. Turner can worship false gods like male
characters.

reading this book will send you into a deep depression because after you finish you will realize you spent hours translating this book into real english in your head and then you gained absolutely nothing from it.

abcdefg gummy bears are chasing me one is red one is blue one is trying to steal my shoe now im running 4 my life cuz the red one has a knife im running at full speed ahead but then i stop cuz i havent been fed i feel my energy bar depleting but then a turkey begins retreating he whines about his finga and then i prone walk since i havent unlocked ninja i barrel roll into the red teddy take his knife and get ready i stab his fluffeh gooey back and then prepare for the secret attack i drop it to the groung and get a predator missile to move a... Read more→